THE Magazine - Dallas / Forthworth

Simple in its presentation, Circle of Friends: Portraits of Artists, is tucked quietly away upstairs at the Amon Carter Museum. In a way, it plays hard to get; it doesn't compel you to come closer -- you must make the first move. But once you get intimate with this collection of portraits and self-portraits of artists by artists, these clear images of the past, so detailed and real, gently conspire to make you part of their world.

Drawn from the museum's collection of American modern photography, the exhibition offers works by members of the San Francisco Group f/64, co-founded by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and other photographers, who broke from the softly focused style of Pictorialism to promote a modernist style of straight photography featuring sharply focused images, high resolution, and strong depth of field. The best of the pictorialist are represented, too, including Alfred Stieglitz.

Although the practice of artist portraiture was widespread in painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography through much of the 20th century, photographers were especially perceptive of a need to document their circles of artist-peers and friends.

Highlights include a pensive profile of James Cagney, a tearful Berenice Abbot, an alluring close-up of actress Gloria Swanson (1950's Sunset Boulevard) and an imposing, full-length portrait of a disheveled but powerful-looking John Marin, an early American modernist artist who died in 1953. Not all subjects are conventional artists: a worker perched precariously high on a steel beam of the unfinished Empire State Building in 1930 is the subject of a Charles Rivers photograph.

Granted, you must give this collection time to work its magic. The casual visitor could easily make a quick sweep and move on to grander, bolder displays. But such a premature dismissal of these small, black-and-white treasures hanging on plain walls would be unfortunate. The photographs speak to you not in simply an artistic sense; they also offer historical narratives, not as pale, tintype ghosts that populate family photo albums but in languages of vivid reality captured on gelatin silver and palladium prints. The effect is enhanced by the honest feelings that emanate naturally from the faces (and hands) of the subjects, as well as the historical documentation of the artist's tools, environments, furniture, and fashions.

The Kelley collection is one of the most esteemed private collections of African-American art, and this special exhibition features more than ninety works on paper by artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson, Alison Saar, and Charles White. Two significant eras are the focus of the exhibition: the 1930s and 1940s, a period which saw the birth of African-American regionalism, and the 1960s and 1970s, which saw the rise of politically motivated and African-inspired themes; subjects range from racism and its related hardships to family, music, and religion. The Kelley's have been collecting art since the mid-1980s, when they viewed an exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Realizing they did not recognize any of the artists' names, they vowed to educate themselves about this aspect of their heritage and built a collection to advance the legacy of African-American art. The Kelley's will be on hand at the museum on June 6 to participate in a discussion about the art. Reservations are required for the lecture, but admission is free.

Drawn to the avant-garde, Ms. Crane is inspired by modern and innovative ideas. The artist carries a notebook with her to art events to log what she finds exciting, for use in future work. These notes may be patterns of rhythm or dynamic color combinations. Her work expands the confines of traditional photography, capturing dynamic depictions of the world around her. "Her highly experimental and tremendously varied photographs animatedly challenge photography's very character as a descriptive tool," says the Carter's Senior Curator of Photographs, John Rohrbach. "This show exudes her infectious energy and imagination. Anyone who sees it will never look at photographs the same way again." Ms. Crane will also lecture on American photography on February 11, reservations are required as seating is limited.

There are otherwise well-informed residents of the Metroplex who contend the Amon Carter Museum is a stodgy repository of cowboy art. Well, they're about to be spanked into consciousness by the museum's latest video installation, Mary Lucier's The Plains of Sweet Regret. And, contrary to what may be perceived as common lore, this is not a departure for a museum with a laudable collection that owes apologies to no one. For instance, the Amon Carter has one of the finest -- and well-lauded -- collections of American photography in the country. This was clear to anyone who witnessed the strident and controversial Richard Avedon exhibit installed over two decades ago. While the museum is admittedly small, it's impeccably curated and unequivocally a hidden jewel of North Texas.

While this is the first video installation at the Amon Carter, assistant curator Jessica May clearly states the internationally acclaimed artist's work is completely within the museum's ongoing mission. I cannot help but agree. For those who think the museum is in need of revamping, they are just blowin' in the wind. The Amon Carter is -- and has always been -- right on track. And this new exhibit (showing until February 15, 2009) is one more stellar example of how astute they really are. The Plains of Sweet Regret is a spilling presence that's nothing short of ecclesiastical. Inside the luminous screens, inside the video frames, one finds a sophisticated and lyric homage to the indomitable and invincible quality of cyclic time.

Ms. Lucier spreads before us a rich and swarming life that's elegiac without ever succumbing to sentimentality. It's gorgeous in the way America is most gloriously beautiful. We're privileged to witness images of abandoned architecture, apertures in rusted cars, and tall, waving grass -- all carefully synchronized with a haunting score that eventually evolves into a second segment of paired, almost fractal, images of rodeo clips and, yes, music by George Strait.

Okay, you can think, "Aha, I knew it." But you'd be wrong. This is elegant art, free of clichés and fallacy. Once the tremendous cinematic opening of firmament and terrain releases into a segment of paired, unfurling images, it's akin to watching a seed split. There's a volatile plenum that charges the images and, yes, the music pushes the whole piece forward. It's remarkably well done, and it's a bold choice for the area. After all, unlike it's previous show in New York, the risk here is that it will be taken at face value. That's not wholly a loss. But what a shame to miss out on what Parisians, for instance, would softly sigh and murmur over because they love unmanicured geography and testosterone. It's good stuff.

The Plains of Sweet Regret, ultimately, invokes a stirring tribute of small towns burdened with grave uncertainty -- a dwindling population as more and more families move to urban areas. But to her credit, Ms. Lucier doesn't politicize the images. Instead, she let's them seep into our consciousness, to haunt us hours after leaving them.